The authors gratefully acknowledge the valuable assistance of many people who commented on preliminary drafts of this book. In particular, we thank Loyce Adams, Bill Coughran, Matthew Fishler, Peter Forsyth, Roland Freund, Gene Golub, Eric Grosse, Mark Jones, David Kincaid, Steve Lee, Tarek Mathew, Noël Nachtigal, Jim Ortega, and David Young for their insightful comments. We also thank Geoffrey Fox for initial discussions on the concept of templates, and Karin Remington for designing the front cover.
This work was supported in part by DARPA and ARO under contract number DAAL03-91-C-0047, the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center Cooperative Agreement No. CCR-8809615, the Applied Mathematical Sciences subprogram of the Office of Energy Research, U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract DE-AC05-84OR21400, and the Stichting Nationale Computer Faciliteit (NCF) by Grant CRG 92.03.